Is Google Enforcing Its AdSense Editorial Guidelines?

By Exclusive Concepts Blog TeamDecember 5, 2005

Bloggers have recently been questioning the ad review process at Google. Peter Hershberg recounts how his attempt to explain search marketing to his friends and family on Thanksgiving “quickly turned into a case study on how to violate nearly every one of Google’s editorial guidelines and create an awful user experience.?? To introduce them to search marketing, Hershberg googled “google?? and found that the results violated 5 of Google’s own editorial guidelines. He went on:

I’ve often heard web designers and SEO shops make the case that they’re so busy servicing their customers, they don’t have the time to focus on developing their own websites. In other words, they don’t always practice what they preach.

All this makes me wonder whether Google is so concerned with maintaining its $400+ stock price and servicing its paying advertisers that it doesn’t have the time to monitor what’s going on with its own brand name.

Commenter John K asks, “I wonder when that lack of consistency is going to cost them in a lawsuit???

Other bloggers have noticed the sporadic enforcement of the editorial guidelines. On Search Engine Watch, Marcia writes that “screening Adwords ads is sparse and random at best,” while Turulillo describes the same phenomenon outside of the US:

Today, we can see Casino on Net (or one of their affiliates) advertising on n°1 position on all those markets through Google AdWords, and if you check, you’ll see that the URL they’ve puted in the AdWords system is 888.com (+affiliate ID which could also be just a conversion tracker). They didn’t use a trick, they didn’t put a ‘clean” URL to bypass the human edition process, otherwise we would have seen a redirection. The fact that the URL which appears in the AdWords system is 888.com means that on this particular case, the human edition process didn’t exist, otherwise this couldn’t happen. And Casino on Net isn’t an exception, it’s becoming the rule.

Google responded that they continue to use a combination of humans and technology to review keywords and ads.